Nowcasting: The real-time informational content of macroeconomic data

A tormal method is developed for evaluating the marginal impact that intra-monthly data releases have on current-quarter forecasts (nowcasts) of real gross domestic product (GDP) growth. The method can track the real-time flow of the type of information monitored by central banks because it can handle large data sets with staggered data-release dates. Each time new data are released, the nowcasts are updated on the basis of progressively larger data sets that, reflecting the unsynchronized datarelease dates, have a jagged edge across the most recent months. (c) 2008 Elsevier BY. All rights reserved.